Posts by Displacement Activity

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Re: Linux long ago reached parity with Windows and OS X.

Looked like this was going to be an interesting article till I read the first line. What total bollox - "chalk long ago reached parity with cheese"?

I've been using Unix, variants and descendants, for 30-odd years, and I use Linux day in and day out. In all that time the only half-usable "desktop world" that I've had, and that I would seriously consider as a replacement for a modern working Windows desktop, was Solaris. I've spent a year with Unity on my laptop and every time I turn it on I remember that I need to get on to the internet to figure out how to remove it. 'Parity' my ass. And I'm still waiting for a usable file explorer.

Linux is great for what it does, which is by no stretch of the imagination the same as what Windows does.

So MS can't tell the difference between 90 days and 3 months...

Re: What happened to cheap and cheerful?

Fasthosts in general: they went through a really bad time maybe 3 years ago. I signed up 2 years ago, without doing my homework. I've been running bare-metal Linux/Apache/stuff at Fasthosts ever since, with no problems that I can immediately remember. Their prices were (still are, I think) cheap, presumably because of their history. I wouldn't have a problem recommending them.

And on LAMP security/time and money: bollox. If you don't know how to keep a Linux box secure, then you're in the wrong business, and going for Windows 2003/anything isn't going to help you. The only problem I've had in 2 years was Shellshock, which I fixed in half an hour.

Re: Debugging experience is better in IE

How does that help (seriously?)

The server and client are asynchronous and completely unrelated, probably running on different platforms, connected only by a thousand miles of wet string. Use your browser/whatever to step through the JS, use your server dev tools to step through the server code. JS almost always runs asynchonously; there is no temporal correspondence between the client and server. Have I missed the point, or are you on too much MS Kool-Aid?

Polymer?

29 comments and no-one's mentioned Polymer? Anyone used it? Just spent 20 minutes with it and it looks interesting. It only seems to have the Metro-like blocky theme, which I'm not keen on (looks crap, actually, too many colours, too big, too square, but might appeal to Metro users), and it doesn't look production-ready. The Bootstrap look-and-feel is much cleaner, IMHO. Other immediate reactions are that the UI designer looks like it might save a lot of trouble, and that it might currently be too network-heavy for general web apps on a mobile.

@BigNose

To be fair, Google's done a Microsoft. Chrome is the default browser on Android, so the vast majority of Android users (which means a significant majority of phone users) are using Chrome. So these stats don't reflect user choice

No - StatCounter doesn't make it clear if 'Browser' means all browsers, or just desktop browsers, but it seems that it's just desktop browsers. In any event, you can generate the mobile browser stats at StatCounter, and 'Chrome' is not shown as a mobile browser; it shows 'Android'. And, second, 'Android' is buried in 'Others' on the Browser chart (the one in the article), at 0.47%.

Re: Vaporware

HAS THERE BEEN any single "pellet" compressed all the way to fusion yet in practice? Yes or no?

No. It's just a proposal to generate $1B in funding. Here's a 30-page pdf which expands on the summary in the Reg link:

http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/716077main_Slough_2011_PhI_Fusion_Rocket.pdf

In short, fusion gain is required to get the necessary energy. The authors discuss Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF), saying:

"This Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) approach has been actively pursued by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) of the DOE for decades as it represents essentially a nano-scale version of a fusion explosive device.... It appears that the most promising solution to accomplish this is with a large array of high power pulsed lasers focused down on to the D-T pellet....The National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Livermore National Laboratory is now in the process of testing a laser driven pellet implosion capable producing significant fusion gain for the first time....While the expected energy yield is in the range appropriate for propulsion (E ~ 20- 100 MJ), the scale and mass of the driver (lasers and power supplies) is not, as it requires an aerial photograph to image the full system."

Hence the cunning plan to use Magneto Inertial Fusion (MIF), where there's some theoretical work to show "that if the imploding shell on to the magnetized target were fully three dimensional, fusion gain could be achieved on a small scale with sub-megajoule liner (shell) kinetic energy. "

The authors say there are a number of challenges still to be resolved, but "The key to answering all four “hows” stems from current research being done at MSNW on the magnetically driven 3D implosion of metal foils on to an FRC target for obtaining fusion conditions."

Re: I smell collusion

They also own the sites which host the adverts, or have an agreement with the owners. In other words, they publish the ads, and their botnet then clicks the ads. The advertiser pays the network (Google, for example) something in the region of 10c - 50c for the botnet's click, and Google pays the site owner some percentage of this. Great work if you can get it.

Re: Death to the cloud

Well, no-one else has mentioned it, so I'll just point out that Drive is a lot more useful than just some place to put all your important data while you wait for someone else to lose it for you.

It's also where Apps Script (GAS) is hosted. I did some work for a local sports club recently that would normally have involved writing code to parse a spreadsheet, finding a server somewhere, setting up Apache, talking Ajax, lots of JavaScript, a bit of HTML, and so on. 2 or 3 weeks work, for no money, so it would never have happened. Instead, I did the whole thing on GAS in a couple of evenings, and they've got a pretty usable website with a complex form entry system for free. I bet there's a lot of people doing this sort of thing on Drive, and I/they don't care if it drops out occasionally.

Of course, GAS is full of bugs, and is practically unsupported, and development seems to have stopped, and it's generally a bit of a pile of sh*te. Still, it's a great idea, and it's better than nothing.

And in more interesting news...

PointDNS lost all its DNS servers for several hours on Tuesday morning. They blamed it on a DDOS attack, saying it "definitely originated in China" (with no details). My email and sites were down all morning.

@dssf: Re: "You have to sign in with your facebook account to activate the trial."?

Don't worry about it. I had to sign up to get support from Samsung (they very cleverly used FB's "technology" to avoid providing support, while making you think that your posts were visible and being read).

Anyway, after calming down, I signed up with the name of a well-known cartoon character, after some slight modification, to get it past their checkers. FB now sends me occasional mails telling me about people on the other side of the world who also went to "The University of Life". They think I'm really stupid, and it's great. I use it for logging onto other sites, and I get counted as an "active user", and I've done my own little bit to screw FB. I think I may go and click on some ads when I get bored.

I haven't read the paper, but I think it's pretty obvious that they are suggesting that current qubit experiments have not yet proven that "local realism" etc. (my emphasis), not that quantum mechanics doesn't exist. They're not physicists (I think), but they're not stupid either. And I didn't downvote you.

And I don't know what your beef with wavefunctions is. Maybe you did it another way, but it's a perfectly good model.

All three machines and others of the time, Johnson maintains, contain TV-out circuitry inspired by his pioneering work on the Microtan.

Cite? Everybody at the time just used an Astec modulator. The Microtan-65 photo even shows exactly that.

According to Paul Johnson, the ULA was originally created as a TTL (Transistor-Transistor Logic) integrated circuit.

Some confusion in this paragraph - the ULA emulator would have been a PCB with discrete TTL devices on it. The quote at the end of the paragraph doesn't make any sense.

I think Barry Muncaster was being a little disingenuous with this one:

“The 16K Oric [was] exactly the same design as the 48K Oric,” said Muncaster. “We would have had no problems if the specification of a particular chip had not altered just prior to manufacture. However, it did, which resulted in us having to change the 16K circuit board. This has meant a 12-week delay in production.”

The only thing that could have caused a 12-week delay would have a ULA re-spin. So, was it Tangerine's own spec alteration that caused the problem?

Re: Nice article - but not one of the top 3 machines...

The of course the IBM PC came along and made everything generic, beige, slow and boring for a decade and a half.

Don't know why anyone would down-vote that - it's absolutely true. The PC was probably the major factor that killed off nearly everybody else in the 84/85 timeframe. The hardware was crap, and DOS was crap. Everyone bought it simply because of the IBM name. And, yes, we were stuck with crap for at least 15 years. I was using a Hercules graphics card till about 2000, to get second-rate mono bit-mapped graphics, when home computers had had it sorted in the early 80's.

Re: @Displacement Activity -- @Graham Wilson

I wasn't objecting to your use of EMF; I just put it in quotes because I didn't want to repeat it.

The point of my reply was that free electrons are not a problem. They can't be, because metals are full of them, and you have no problem with mechanical systems. But, you do have a problem with electronic systems, precisely because of the free electrons.

Ok, you may have lots of valid reasons for not trusting electronic systems, but "free electrons" should not be one of them. Besides, in this case, it's Chemistry that's the problem, not electronics.

And I was also pointing out that electromagnetism is not "ephemeral and easily disrupted". And, quite apart from anything else, the actual movement of electrons has pretty much nothing to do with the operation of electronics. That's just something they teach kids in school. Electrons crawl through a conductor - I forget precisely how fast, but maybe a cm a second. But signals propagate across PCBs and ICs at close to the speed of light. Electronics is about electric fields, not electron movement.

@Graham Wilson

After all, a mechanical system is one made up of atoms—atoms whose electrons are tightly bound to the nucleus and thus extremely stable. However, in an electronic system electrons are freed from atoms and are subject to the most ephemeral and easily disrupted of all the forces of nature—the electromotive force

Hope you didn't ask the aviation experts about this. Any conductor has free electrons; that's why it's an electrical conductor (and, to a lesser extent, a heat conductor). Mechanical systems tend to be metallic, and so have free electrons. Look up 'conduction band'. And there's nothing "ephemeral and easily disrupted" about electromagnetism ("the electromotive force"). Look around you - everything you see, every natural phenomena, the form of every physical object - if it's not that way because of gravity, or the strong or weak nuclear forces, then it's that way because of electromagnetism.

Physics 001

The authors explain that their calculations suggest that of the 16 Terawatts of global energy consumption in 2006

Watts power, Joules energy, and Joules = Watts times seconds. '16TW' isn't an energy consumption, it's an instantaneous power usage. The number you've given (16) is approximately the energy consumed every hour (ie. 16TWh). Over an entire year, 16TWh is about 140,000TWh, or 5 x 10^20 J, or 505 exajoules.

Is this a Verizon press release?

I smell a fish - this is straight out of a Dilbert strip. Someone that smart wouldn't have let his subcontractor connect directly. And when did the Chinese subcontractor actually connect? In the middle of the night? And why did this "star programmer" actually bother going in to work to surf the web all day, presumably at the same time that "he" was connected externally? And is Verizon a bit like the US version of Vodafone? If so, what sort of moron would ask them to do a security audit?

Que?

Sorry, got to add to the 86 comments...

Monitors don’t age very well; growing, as they do, dimmer and yellower as time passes.

Wrong. My 12-year-old near-perfect £600 CRT is going on the skip today, as it has just started to flicker occasionally (Mitsubishi Diamond Plus, 22", 1280x1024). This replaced my near-perfect Hitachi 21" CRT (also 1280x1024), which lasted about 10 years (cost about £1000 in ~1991).

The only replacement I've got lying around the office is a cheap 24" Philips 244E (1920x1080). It's pretty much unusable for development work. Lots of real estate, but it doesn't have the pin-sharp clarity of a good CRT.

Any why are you reviewing affordable monitors? I though this was a site for IT professionals? Your readers sit in front of a monitor all day, every day. Nobody in their right mind is going to save a couple of hundred quid on a second-rate monitor.

Another review, please: good monitors, for text-based work, that I can sit on front of all day long. We don't all sit around watching DVDs at work.

Re: LazyBrush

Does anyone actually belive this?

http://www.scribd.com/doc/115605348/Eurograbber

This is a press release, not a detailed description of how they broke this attack. The last paragraph of the executive summary even ends with The case study closes with an overview of how individuals can protect themselves against the Eurograbber attack, including specific insight to how Check Point products and Versafe products protect against this attack. The article is pathetic, and looks like it was written by teenagers. If there's any truth in the article, then they must have hacked at least two drop zones, but they give no details on how they did this. The article isn't even consistent about the URLs of the drop zones, saying that two were known, and listing 4 elsewhere, and blanking different parts of the URLs in different parts of the article.

@JSmith: Re: Taxing revenue instead of profits ...

It's more complicated than that. First, all income is taxed, in the form of VAT. In most cases, something close to 20% of the money that comes in the door goes straight out again to the government.

Second, we're only talking about corporation tax here, which is a tax on the company profits. To extract real money from the company, shareholders must take dividends, and tax is paid on the dividends at the normal rates.

Third, most companies in this business have margins of maybe 10 - 20% - ie. what's left over after legitimate expenses (wages, etc) have been deducted. The govt and the owners share out the remaining 10 or 20%. If the govt took its share before expenses, there would very quickly be nothing (or less than nothing) left for the owners, and no reason for them to remain in business. And, remember, the owners have to pay income tax on their share anyway, as soon as the money leaves the company.

Re: Arguments are lame

I use Office 2000 (just Word and Excel) and various flavours of OO/LO, and have done for years, and it's a sad fact that O2000 is much better. I'm not talking about basic documents and adding up a few numbers in a spreadsheet; I'm talking about 100-page docs with complex TOCs, cross-referencing, footnotes, and so on, and complex spreadsheets that actually do something clever, short of macros and database access.

If OO/LO could match O2000 they would be wildly successful; I can't see that the MS products actually added anything of any value after 2000 (apart from bug fixes).

Re: I've got LO 3.6.1.2 installed and some of it doesn't impress me

I like LO, or at least the idea of it, and it has actually helped me before, but unless in my experience is atypical then it's got a long way to go.

Unfortunately, it all has a long way to go. I've spent years trying to make do with various flavours of OO/etc on Windows and Linux, and none of it is quite right. Fine for basic stuff, but that's it. And, if you can be arsed to file a report, you'll probably get someone who says "it doesn't matter how MS did it, this is better, but I can't quite explain why".

Interesting that some of them kept Office 2000 as a back-up, which is what I do. This has clearly got nothing to do with the fact that it doesn't need to be registered.

Sums 101, Mr. Susser

In my local world-class and international technology hub, most of the engineers are "white guys". I'd say that maybe one in thirty was not a white guy. Ruby devs would tend to be towards the nerd end of this scale, so they're even more likely to be guys. But let's stick with a probability of 29/30 of randomly picking out an engineer from a line-up and discovering that he's a "white guy".

So, the probability of randomly selecting a panel of 15, which eventually turns out to be composed exclusively of "white guys", is (29/30)^15, or 60%. In fact, you need a panel of at least 20 randomly-selected people to have even a 50% chance of finding any "minorities".

So, it's hardly a big deal. Perhaps Mr. Susser should go home and stop being an arse.

Re: it's for the missus - whats money got to do with anything?

The extra £100-£150 on a spec for spec comparison is no news at all.

£210, actually (my real Nexus 7 32GB cellular, vs. "two weeks" iPad mini cellular, £239 vs £449). In fact, if you got your missus two Nexus 7 cellulars, and 145 tracks from Amazon or Google, it would cost exactly the same as one iPad mini cellular, and 145 tracks from iTunes. Perhaps you'd better not tell her that. On the other hand, you could get her a Nexus 4 phone, and and a Nexus 7 cellular, and a bunch of flowers with the change from £449.

Don't know what an iCosystem is, but my Galaxy Nexus phone and Nexus-7 sync apps automatically, with no intervention on my part. Any my wife thinks I've done magic as well. The apps on my phone just appeared on the Nexus 7 during installation. And the display on the Nexus 7 is proper HD, at 1280x800, and you have to dick about to pretend to show HD on the mini's 1024x768 display.

And LTE (ie. what the marketing guys call "4G")? Good luck with that. I can barely get internet access from Vodafone, even when I'm connected on HSPA+. When I do get a connection I'm lucky to get a couple of hundred kbits/s. It has taken over 12 years to get to this state on 3G - by the time the operators have agreed on what 4G is and have installed all the new kit, and have any bandwidth, all my current kit will be landfill.

@Joerg: Re: So cancelling Win32 APIs and forcing Metro is "to get back to parity" ?

Google Nexus 7 3G out today

As title - appeared in Google Play today, and I've just ordered one, for 3-5 day delivery. 32GB, WiFi+Mobile, unlocked, £239, plus £14 delivery. No case, though - the old cases don't seem to fit.

The iPad Mini 32GB cellular is showing as £449 on Apple's website, with a despatch date of "Late November". The Nexus-7 has a better spec than the mini on just about everything, except that the mini also has a 64GB version (£529), and has a rear-facing 5Mp camera. Oh, and it comes in a choice of two colours... :)

What a great idea!

I've just penned a letter to Tescos and Morrisons, telling them to return 9% of everything I paid them in 2011. As an incentive, only the first to return a cheque will be retained as my preferred groceries partner.

Which reminds me - one of my clients wrote to all its suppliers last year, retrospectively changing their Ts&Cs, putting everyone on what was effectively 6-month terms. I wrote back, telling them to f**k off and pay up, which they duly did. Pretty much all their other suppliers did the same thing.

Dumb

1 - Some part of the cloud will eventually end up physically located in the US. That will be enough for the FBI/whoever to claim that some unspecified crime with a 30-year tariff has been committed in the US.

2 - No reputable cloud provider is going to be stupid enough to think that encryption allows plausible deniability.

3 - As night follows day, this will lead to cloud providers refusing to host encrypted content from any clients, including you and me.

4 - This won't make it any harder to track down PB. All roads will still lead to their load balancers. The fact that there's no content on site won't make a blind bit of difference.

5 - Any cloud provider with the infrastructure to provide a good service will (a) have servers in the US, and (b) will be desperate to keep on the right side of the law, so will (c) shop PB to the FBI without a moment's hesitation.

So, what's the point? They should have stuck with physical servers in a country with no laws. They must know this. My guess is that this press release is all just spin.